ace's blog » Vonage

Vonage troubles in a nut-shell

petewood — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 16:59:54 +0000

Back when Vonage had it’s IPO, I was excited about it, thinking it was going to be another Google-type money making IPO. As it turns out, I’m glad I’m not a day-trader.

If you haven’t been following along lately, Vonage has had a bit of trouble. First, they were being sued by Verizon for patent infringement. Next, a judge said that they were guilty of infringing on 3 of Verizon‘s patents and ordered to pay a settlement (of around $58M) and was told to stop infring on the patents. There was some seemingly good news for Vonage – they signed a deal with Voiceone that would help them to stop infringing on 2 of the 3 patents. Then Vonage’s CEO stepped down. A few day after that, Vonage was told that they were not allowed to sign-up any new customers until they found a work-around to the patent-infringement issue. Now, just across my desktop scrolled another Vonage-may-die headline “Vonage: No tech ‘workaround’“. So what’s next? I don’t know, I’m just a former customer who has mixed feelings about their service and has remained interested in the company. I know a lot of people who use Vonage and really like the idea of having a VoIP phone and how the service works.

One thing I am unsure of is how all of this will impact some of the other VoIP companies out there like Packet8, SunRocket or even AT&T’s VoIP offering. Maybe it is just my lack of understanding but if Vonage is saying there isn’t another way for them to connect VoIP calls, then wouldn’t that mean the samething regarding the way that all of the other VoIP companies connect VoIP calls? Why would Verizon go after Vonage and not someone much larger (and with deeper pockets) like AT&T?

Edit: I was perusing Digg.com and found this article pointing to a very good blog post from Engadget.com. For even more information, you could visit Wikipedia‘s Vonage article, which is much more thorough than this post.

Vonage woes

petewood — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 16:30:20 +0000

Now my Vonage line almost works. I moved the phone adapter (Linksys RTP300) to the DMZ of my main router (WRT54GX4) mostly because I don’t know all of the ports that I would need to open up if I just wanted to forward ports. After reading a ton of reviews/posts about Vonage, I’m rather worried that I made a bad decision that will end up costing us more money to get back what we already had. Only time will tell, we’ll see.

Vonage and fam update

petewood — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 13:42:15 +0000

We signed up for Vonage just before our Christmas vacation. I spent about an hour trying to set it up before we left. I was having mixed feelings about it but now, after I tinkered more with it last night, it is working a lot better! We can make and receive calls now! woo hoo! Only issue now it the static we hear from an incoming call. Hopefully that won’t take any time to fix…hopefully!

Last night I had to talk to my mom about her not coming here in January. It was a tough call but is the best situation for everyone. The timing just isn’t right after what happened or didn’t happen actually with Christmas. Hopefully some day it will all work out. Somehow I doubt it but we’ll see.